Element-wise addition of 2 lists?

Question

I have now:

list1 = [1, 2, 3]
list2 = [4, 5, 6]

I wish to have:

[1, 2, 3]
 +  +  +         


        

Answer 1

Perhaps this is pythonic and slightly useful if you have an unknown number of lists, and without importing anything.

As long as the lists are of the same length, you can use the below function.

Here the *args accepts a variable number of list arguments (but only sums the same number of elements in each).

The * is used again in the returned list to unpack the elements in each of the lists.

def sum_lists(*args):
    return list(map(sum, zip(*args)))

a = [1,2,3]
b = [1,2,3]  

sum_lists(a,b)

Output:

[2, 4, 6]

Or with 3 lists

sum_lists([5,5,5,5,5], [10,10,10,10,10], [4,4,4,4,4])

Output:

[19, 19, 19, 19, 19]